Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn based performer, choreographer and writer creating multidisciplinary performance pieces. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in much of her work. Her highly experimental productions include Bessie Award-winning Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance, Bessie Award-winning Bronx Gothic, Poor People's TV Room, When I Return Who Will Receive Me, and Adaku's Revolt. Recent works include installations in the exhibitions: Grief and Grievance, Art and Mourning in America at the New Museum, Witchhunt at The Hammer Museum in LA, and Sex Ecologies at Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway. Commissions include the performance On the way, undone at the Highline in New York City and at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn as part of FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival, the film Returning for Danspace Project, and the site specific performance Swallow the Moon at Jacob’s Pillow. She has worked with film and theater directors: Carrie Mae Weems, Ralph Lemon, Arthur Jafa, Terence Nance, Josephine Decker, Mika Rottenberg, Mahyad Tousi, Charlotte Brathwaite, Jim Findlay, Annie Dorsen, and Peter Born.

Okpokwasili’s residencies and awards include The French American Cultural Exchange (2006–07); Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography Choreographic Fellowship (2012); Baryshnikov Arts Center Artist-in-Residence (2013); New York Live Arts Studio Series (2013); Under Construction at the Park Avenue Armory (2013); New York Foundation for the Arts’ Fellowship in Choreography (2013); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Program (2014–17, 2019–20); ICPP at Wesleyan (2015), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ artist grant in dance (2014); BRIClab (2015); Columbia University (2015), the Rauschenberg Residency (2015), the Mellon Creative Futures Fellowship at Carolina Performing Arts, UNC-Chapel Hill (2018–21). Okpokwasili was the 2015–17 Randjelovic/Stryker New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA.) She was a 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellow, a 2018 Herb Alpert Awardee in Dance, an Antonyo Awardee, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Awardee, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. She was the inaugural artist for the Kravis Studio Residency program at MOMA in 2022. 

Peter Born works as a director, composer, and designer of performance and installation, often in collaboration with Okwui Okpokwasili, with whom he has created the installation repose without rest without end in Trondheim (2021), Swallow the Moon at Jacob’s Pillow (2021), on the way, undone at the High Line (2021), Poor People’s TV Room (SOLO) installation at the New Museum and the Hammer Museum (2021), Sitting on a Man’s Head (2019) at Danspace Project, Adaku’s Revolt (2019) at Abrons Arts Center, At the Anterior Edge (2018) with the Barnard Dance Department, Poor People’s TV Room (2017), when I return, who will receive me (2016), Bronx Gothic (The Oval) (2014), Bronx Gothic (2013) and pent-up: a revenge dance (2009), as well as an album they produced together day pulls down the sky (2019). Their work has also appeared in the Berlin Biennale and at the Tate Museum, London.  He has collaborated with David Thomson as a director, designer and writer on The Venus Knot (2017) and he his own mythical beast (2018), and as a set designer for Nora Chipaumire’s rite/riot (2014) and El Capitan Kinglady (2016). His work Poor People’s TV Room (SOLO), created in collaboration with Okwui Okpokwasili, is in the collections of the Hammer Museum and the Whitney Museum. Four of Peter’s collaborations have garnered New York Dance Performance Bessie Awards. His work as an art director and prop stylist has been featured in video and photo projects with Vogue, Estee Lauder, Barney’s Co-op, Bloomingdales, Old Navy, 25 magazine, The Wall Street Journal and No Strings Puppet Productions. He is a former New York public high school teacher, itinerant floral designer, corporate actor-facilitator, video maker and furniture designer.

Linsey Bostwick currently works as the Director of the NYU Production Lab which is dedicated to development for artists. Linsey spent 2016–22 living and working in the Middle East as the Director of Artistic Planning at The Arts Center at New York University Abu Dhabi. She has spent many years prior to that producing works in New York City and internationally. From 2010–16 she worked on the producing team of Pomegranate Arts with artists such as Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Lucinda Childs, Robert Wilson (Einstein on the Beach), and Taylor Mac. She had been a long time creative/producing collaborator with Big Art Group and worked with Cynthia Hopkins, Susan Marshall, Nina Winthrop among others artists. Bostwick has been published in the Yale Theatre Journal and the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. In Spring 2020 Bostwick guest edited the Electra Street journal dedicated to the relationship of art and research. Bostwick has been a leadership fellow with the Association of Performing Arts Professionals. Bostwick holds two Bachelor’s degrees from University of Washington: Seattle and a Master of Fine Arts from Brooklyn College in Interactive Performance and Media Arts.

mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as Brooklyn, New York. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their dance film, Whale Fall. They were a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist and a Princeton University Hodder Fellow. They recently moved by the beach and enjoy watching beautiful sunsets in Far Rockaway.

Michaelangelo DeSerio—Production Manager, Technical and Lighting Director—is very happy to work with Okwui and Peter again. He has worked with them both on various projects for the last seven years and as a company member for the last five. Hailing from Brooklyn but based right now in Malmö, Sweden, Michaelangelo is a multi-disciplinary technical theater artist, father and adventurer actively working in dance and theater both stateside and in Europe. He has been fortunate enough to collaborate with many amazing companies including Judith Malina’s The Living Theatre, Early Morning Opera, Meg Wolfe Dance, The New Wild, Theatre Three Collaborative, and Irondale Ensemble Project. Currently, he serves as the Master Electrician at Skanes Dansteater in Malmö.

Lauren DiGiulio is a curator and art historian. Her writings on dance and visual art have been published in academic journals, exhibition catalogues, and books. She has curated events and exhibitions at The Watermill Center, the Center for Performance Research, the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, and the George Eastman Museum, among others. She was the dramaturg and artistic producer for The Sundance Kid is Beautiful with Christopher Knowles, a solo performance presented at The Louvre, Performa 13, and the ICA Philadelphia in 2013–15. As a producer, she has worked with the New Island Festival on Governor’s Island, the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation, and the Willem de Kooning Foundation. From 2020–21, she was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Carolina Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She received her PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester.

McKenzie Frye is a multidisciplinary performing artist, songwriter, and choreographer from Detroit, MI. She is also a Howard University graduate with a B.F.A. in Musical Theatre. Frye's Broadway credits include the 2022 revival of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Her Off Broadway and Regional credits include: Hippest Trip: The Soul Train Musical, The Bluest Eye (Huntington Theatre), Syncing Ink (Alley Theatre/The Flea), Wig Out! (Vineyard Theatre), Harriet’s Return starring Debbie Allen (Kennedy Center), Dreamgirls (Arkansas Rep), River Deep (Peter Jay Sharp Theater), Damn Yankees (The Black Rep). Film & TV credits include: wishing…, The Stronger, My Brother and Law & Order. @mckenziefrye

James Gibbel makes clothing for performing artists. Their work has been worn on performers at Art Basel Miami, the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, REDCAT, the Boston Lyric Opera, as well as basements and the mall. James is based in Brooklyn and is on the web at jamesgibbel.fyi

Kearra Amaya Gopee (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary visual artist from Carapichaima, Kairi (the larger of the twin-island nation known as Trinidad and Tobago), living on Lenape land (New York, NY). Using video, sculpture, sound, writing and other media, they identify both violence and time as primary conditions that undergird the anti-Black world in which they work: a world that they are intent on working against through myriad collective interventions. In the spirit of maroonage, they have been developing an artist residency in Trinidad and Tobago titled a small place, after Jamaica Kincaid's book of the same name. They hold a MFA from University of California, Los Angeles; BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University, and are an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. They have recently held fellowships from Queer|Art and MacDowell, and they are currently an Elaine G. Weitzen ISP Studio Program Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Audrey Elaine Hailes (she/we) is a dance-theatre artist based up and down the Eastern Seaboard. She currently works with Maria Bauman as the associate artistic director of MBDance and is a producing fellow with Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Initiative. They have had the privilege of performative and collaborative relationships with Paloma McGregor, Ebony Golden, Nina Angela Mercer, Okwui Okpokwasili, Ani Taj and others. Audrey has served as movement consultant for institutions such as New York University Abu Dhabi, The Kennedy Center and Atlantic Theatre Co. Our own choreography has been commissioned by Gibney Dance, Dance Theatre Etc, Movement Research, BAAD! and New York Live Arts. We are always grateful to be able to tell stories that honor ancestors and reflect the bright black future.

Will Johnson is a multimedia artist and composer from New York City. Themes from his work include the black radical tradition, phantom archives, and the latent poetics of digital signal processing. He is the recipient of the Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Sound Art/Composition and the McKnight Foundation’s Fellowship for Musicians. His commercial work includes licensed sound and original composition for Acura, GAP, Beats Electronics, HBO and vocal contributions to 2016 Grammy-winning best electronic album Skin. Live performances by Johnson have been commissioned by Lincoln Center, the Kitchen, 92Y and Mass MoCA. He is currently a doctoral candidate and researcher at Brown University.

Katherine Profeta is a NYC dramaturg for dance, theater, and points in between. She is thrilled to be working with Okwui, Peter, and the cast on adaku. Her longest role as a dance dramaturg has been with choreographer/visual artist Ralph Lemon, since 1997. Other artists she has worked with/for over the years include Alexandra Beller, Nora Chipaumire, Karin Coonrod, Annie Dorsen, Julie Taymor, David Thomson, Sage Ni’Ja Whitson, and Netta Yerushalmy. Katherine is also a founding member of Elevator Repair Service, having lent her hand to most of its productions from 1991–2015, usually as choreographer or movement coach. Her first book, Dramaturgy in Motion, came out in 2015 from University of Wisconsin Press. She currently enjoys teaching as a Professor in the Practice of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.

Tegan Ritz McDuffie (she/they) is an intersectional artist and organizer, deeply rooted in ethics of care. Tegan has created, managed, and facilitated performances around the world, collaborating with companies and institutions such as Sweat Variant, Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Arts, NYU Abu Dhabi, Ehemaliges StummfilmKino Delphi, English Theatre Berlin | International Performing Arts Center, and The Watermill Center. Their work has been featured in, and supported, live arts events including the Digital Naturalism Conference, The Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Sikka Art Festival, Prague Quadrennial, Festival Internacional de Marionetas do Porto, and transmediale. Notably, Tegan conducted performance-based research on the entanglements of technology and ecologies as a Fulbright scholar in Germany. They were an originating member of the Anthropocene Research Kitchen at NYU Abu Dhabi, where they previously facilitated academic and artistic projects as the Instructor of Project and Stage Management in the Arts & Humanities division. Tegan holds a BFA in directing from Carnegie Mellon University. Currently, Tegan is establishing an environmental performance lab on her childhood farm in Lenapehoking (present-day eastern Pennsylvania) where values-based process and cross-disciplinary collaborations will incubate radical new work to shape visions for a vibrant, post-humanist future.

Artist and composer Samita Sinha creates multidisciplinary performance works that unravel Indian vocal traditions through the body to create a decolonized, multivalent language of voice and vibration. Sinha’s works have been commissioned by Performance Space, Asia Society, Danspace, Rubin Museum, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Queens Museum, Gibney Dance, and Western Front, and presented by The Kitchen, Wexner Center for the Arts, REDCAT, PICA, National Sawdust and others. She has received awards from National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, National Performance Network, and New York State Council on the Arts.

Stacy Lynn Smith is a neurodivergent, mixed race/Black performance artist, choreographer, director and Green Circle Keeper at Hidden Water (by and for those affected by CSA). Smith has collaborated with an array of talented artists such as: DeForrest Brown Jr., Anna Homler, Karen Bernard, Thaddeus O’Neil, Vangeline Theater (2008–17), Michael Freeman (2010–16), Saints of an Unnamed Country, Salome Asega, GENG, Bradley Bailey, Michele Beck, Jasmine Hearn, mayfield brooks, thinkdance, Kathy Westwater, Josephine Decker, Emily Johnson and more. Member of jill sigman’s artist/activist cohort, Body Politic. Selected by Eva Yaa Asantewaa as part of the curatorial board for Black Womxn Summit. Psychic Wormhole (their research platform) reckons with the devastations of trauma and its relationship to memory and the body through the development of their abstract memoir, RECKONING, a film being created in collaboration with Alex Romania. Smith is a 2022–24 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence.

Born and raised in Philly, AJ Wilmore is an interdisciplinary artist and performer who investigates the quality, degree, and stakes of her existence through voice and movement. Her background traverses the terrains of black improvisation and freestyle traditions, using the internet as a tool for research and extracting archival material. She believes there is something magical and powerful to be discovered in gestures and utters like a key to a door worth entering. As a dancer and collaborator, she's performed in Adaku's Revolt at Abrons Art Center and Sitting on a Man's Head at Danspace Project by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Existing Otherwise by Isabel Lewis at The Philadelphia Art Alliance, and the library by Lauren Bakst at the Centre National de la Danse for the CAMPING festival and international choreographic platform.